The Space Force ended the Resilient GPS program on January 19, a $1 billion plan for about twenty small satellites meant to make the constellation harder to jam. The Government Accountability Office reported on October 7 that the Army will not finish fielding anti-jam M-code receivers across its aircraft until 2049, and across its armored vehicles in 2050 or later, a delay it attributes to a shortage of the chip sets that process the M-code signal. In September a commercial company ordered forty satellites for a navigation system that does not use GPS at all. Its founder takes the Satellite Innovation stage at Silicon Valley Space Week in October.
Patrick Shannon is Founder and Chief Executive of TrustPoint, a C-band GNSS company, where he sets the technical and strategic direction for its navigation and timing products. Before founding it he was a Vice President at Astro Digital, where he oversaw six satellite programs in internet of things, broadband and laser communications, including work for the Space Development Agency and OneWeb. He was Vice President of Business Development at SpaceQuest before that. He began as a satellite systems engineer at Orbital Sciences and moved into corporate strategy supporting mergers and acquisitions. He has spent more than twenty years building commercial products for systems governments have traditionally run, and he holds degrees from MIT and Stanford.
The program describes the brief in one sentence: “Backup systems for GPS exist, but almost nobody is paying for them.” The money bears it out. The cancelled program would have put roughly twenty satellites up at $50 million to $80 million each, against about $250 million each for a GPS III satellite. Work stopped for four industry teams: Astranis with Xona Space Systems, L3Harris, Sierra Space and Axient. Appropriators objected to the Space Force both pausing GPS IIIF procurement and ending the program. Some lawmakers and the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation had argued it bought only a marginal improvement at high cost. SpaceWERX awarded TrustPoint a $4 million contract in May for four satellites and four ground stations, jointly funded by the Small Business Innovation Research program and the Space Force’s Commercial Space Office, whose director sits for a fireside interview on the same stage later that day. Three TrustPoint demonstrators are already on orbit. The company announced in August that its C-band signals had been acquired and tracked through interference on a NovAtel receiver, under a Naval Air Systems Command contract. In September the company contracted EnduroSat US to build forty more across three tranches. TrustPoint puts its signal in C-band from low Earth orbit rather than L-band from medium orbit, which it says buys signal power, jam resistance and better multipath performance. Shannon said in September that the demand for resilient precision PNT was not ordinary market demand but urgent, and for some users existential.
Shannon gives “Protected PNT: The Unfunded Resilience Buy” on Wednesday, October 28, from 9:45 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. He is the only speaker on it. It follows the panel on sovereign constellations and the fragmenting market, and at 10:00 the room turns to orchestrating the direct-to-device network of networks, with the president of Nokia Bell Labs.
Silicon Valley Space Week runs Tuesday, October 27 through Thursday, October 29 at the Computer History Museum, with Satellite Innovation across the first two days and the MilSat Symposium across the last two. Shannon has fifteen minutes on the second morning. None of the forty satellites has launched.
